Day 14: Yeomalt Point

Inky-oily grey below and velvety grey above. The kind of grey that cheers the locals and tears the California transplants. Driving to the beach, most of the cars had their lights on at noon. January on Puget Sound.

Image: Wing Point looking east from Eagle Harbor on a grey day, with Seattle in the background

Swim around Bainbridge is back to normal, the snow is gone and Ocean Guy is back in the water. I wonder if anything will be different after the front page article in the Times, but nobody says anything to me. That is, none of the 5 or so people I pass while walking from my car at Yeomalt Point back to the Wing Point beach entry.

It's good to get wet again.

Image: Wing Point looking north from the ferry on a much brighter day, with Yeomalt Point just behind in the distance.

air temp: 47F
water temp: 47F
Jan 11, noon, cloudy
wind from south, 5-10 mph
medium tide, rising
visibility 10-15 feet
today's distance: 1.14 mile
total so far: 14.65 miles

today's notables:
moon snails
oysters

It's a fairly calm day, but very dark and grey. My first real chance to swim in over 3 weeks. Too long. I'm going even though I won't see much. I can't google up any answers on light attenuation by heavy clouds, but I'm guessing today has no more than 10% the light of a bright sunny day.

As I'm zipping into my wetsuit, catastrophe, the zipper separates at the fully open position. Only it's not the kind of zipper that's supposed to separate. Oh no, the damn thing's broken. Peeling out of the top half, I work hard and manage to get the zipper back together and run the zipper up a couple of inches. This might work. I re-enter the suit and close the zipper carefully. I think I'm good for today, but this bodes ill for the future. I can't afford a fancy new wetsuit right now...Argh.

But back to the matter at hand. Parking at Yeomalt Point, I walk towards Wing Point. It's nice to be out of town so I can walk to my entry point on little roads without many people. I feel odd hiking in a wetsuit carrying my fins, mask, hood and gloves.

Slipping into the cooler water at Wing Point-down to 47F now-it's dark underwater. A bit of murk, and the heavy sky means I have to look closely to see what's happening underwater. Just a few whitecaps and almost no swell.

The Wing Point sandbar is a long shallow point that reaches well out into the Sound. It'll be worth coming back here again on a day with bright sun and glassy water. Suddenly there they are again, moon snails. Lots of them. It's a quick swim out to the point, much quieter than last time I was here. I don't linger because the visibility isn't good enough for a big day exploring the underwater point.

Around the corner, there's a low bank beach rises up to a bluff that hangs over most of the swim, with a narrow beach at the water's edge. The bottom is similar to Wing Point, mixed patches of sand and gravel with a few boulders here and there.

I see someone trolling by in a small fishing boat, and one ferry. Otherwise I'm alone. Who would go out on the water on a day like this?

Between the two points the land indents a bit, and the water is glassy in the elbow. It's fun to put my mask half-in/half-out and kick slowly along watching both sea and sky.

This area was favored by Native Americans before European settlers arrived in the mid to late 1800s, and Yeomalt Point is rumored to be named for the currents that swept bodies to shore following accidents at sea. There is a bit of a current pushing me, but I'm not in the same boat as those early swimmers landing on Yeomalt.

One local told me to watch out for the rip currents here, Yeomalt is a place where two currents meet and push out to sea. With my flippers and the calm wind, I can't imagine a current strong enough to cause a problem.

I cruise to shore landing gently on a gravel beach, and rest there briefly and watch the grey, above and below. It's good to be back home.


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Day 13: Wing Point

Fun of a different sort at Wing Point. Strong south wind brought actual swells to Puget Sound, and the Wing Point sandbar created near-surf conditions at the point. Rocking and rolling in 8 feet of water made for a real ocean swim day. Stormy weather was a great time to hit Wing Point.

(photos: Wing Point from the water. Interesting how the character of a place changes day to day.)

Just inside the sandbar, where the water was a bit deeper and more sheltered, moon snails scoured the sand. Turbulence brought movement to the sandy bottom, and the sand waves (like mini sand dunes 1 inch tall) were marching slowly towards shore.

Some surprise visitors dropped by, and you should hear more about that next week.

air temp: 36F
water temp: 49F
Dec 17, 1pm, mostly cloudy
wind strong from the south, 20-30 mph
high tide, falling
visibility 5-15 feet
today's distance: 0.75 mile
total so far: 13.51 miles

today's notables:
moon snails
stormy conditions with sand waves on the bottom

Today I'm joined by Seattle Times reporter Michelle Ma and photographer Erika Schultz. We meet at the ferry dock (glad that's over with) and drive over to Hawley Cove. We talk a bit, they take some pictures and video, and then I get in the water.

Or...I try to get in the water but a bright blue broken ballon floats up to my ankles. I can't stand balloons in the water, they're terrible for wildlife. I pluck it out of the water and whine a bit about the harm caused by balloons and other trash. Like the discarded lighter on the beach. Argh, what about a light-hearted fun swim?

I resolve to dive in and have some fun, but a plastic bag floats around my calves the next time I try to get in. OK, this is too much, staged by King Neptune for the benefit of the news people. I can see writing, somebody is going to get fingered for ocean abuse. It's...OLD NAVY. How perfect is that, a store called Old Navy polluting the ocean with a totally unnecessary single use plastic bag. I can't leave it, so I pick it up and rant a bit about plastic bags killing ocean animals.

Then, finally, it's into the water. The cold shock wave hits, every time I swear the water has gotten colder. Even though I know it's coming, somehow I can never quite get used to the initial blast of cold, followed by the icy fingers of water leaking in through the seams, gaps, and actual holes in my wetsuit. The cold ring on my face is probably the worst, so I drop in for some quick swimming to fight the chill.

The south wind has a swell running, so the swimming is harder and the waves smack me around enough to cause extra flushing. That's cold water pouring into my wetsuit in a big flush instead of the more typical icy fingers. In a few minutes I'm warmed up and ready to go.

I can see the waves breaking on Wing Point, I saw them from the beach actually. It should be a bit of a wild ride out there.

No sand dollars here, the colony must be closer to the ferry terminal, just offshore of the west side of the Hawley Cove beach. I recommend it highly.

Splashing through the waves, this is much more like ocean swimming than the first 12 legs of my tour. Not a lot of exciting bottom action, most of the action is above the surface. I hear motor noise and look up, it's the ferry coming towards me. But no worries, I have a big red buoy drawing a line in the sand. Ferry on that side, me on this side. I'm glad to hear how loud the boat is, there's no way I could miss a boat this size coming nearby, even with all the wave noise in the water and a rubber hood over my ears.

I see a brilliant, beautiful moon snail bobbing along down there on the bottom. Or rather I'm bobbing up and down so the moon snail slides closer and then further away in time with the waves. I duck down and peer at it, it's a big one at least a foot long with a shell the size of a large soup bowl. Motoring along visibly, oblivious to the action above. It's a relief to finally get under the surface thanks to the majesty of a moon snail.

This is a transition that's usually easier, with my typical calm wind and glassy water swims. But with all the action on the surface and above, getting under is more difficult.

It's like looking at one of those split perspective images, where it's either two faces looking at each other or a vase depending on how you look at it, likeRubin's "ambiguous vase" illusion, visible here. How does this relate to oceans? As I talked about my tour with Michelle, I had a new insight into what I'm finding.

Getting underwater is like going through Alice's looking glass in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There," more commonly known as Alice in Wonderland. She plunges through a mirror and finds a very different world.

Most of us only see the surface when we look at the ocean, we miss the underwater world. Thus a beautiful Eagle Harbor looks surprisingly different and much sadder from underwater. This is true even for me, an ocean person with clear knowledge of what I'd find under a typical marina thanks to my scientific experience.

I'm building a new underwater awareness, the ability to look at the water that I've already toured and easily get through the looking glass and re-enter the underwater consciousness. And I hope I can convey a little bit of that to others who may not choose to get there the way I do.

Now that I've gone through the looking glass on today's swim and found myself focusing underwater, I notice something beautiful.

The turbulent, tumbling water is stirring the sandy ocean bottom, making the sand waves dance. These are the mini-sand dunes that are formed on a shallow, sandy ocean bottom, maybe 1 inch tall and 2 inches wide. As I look closer, I can see some sand particles lifted off the bottom each time a wave passes, and the sand waves are very slightly reshaped. This is the march of the sand waves, they're reforming before my eyes.

What fun this is, to find a miniature drama on the ocean bottom.

I watch the sand waves for a few minutes, hovering and riding up and down in the waves, and then head on out to the tip of Wing Point.

There are some wave deflectors built with concrete here, and a heavily armored shore. No wonder why. Crashing waves make this look like an exposed coastline instead of a sheltered Puget Sound shore.

It's a lovely roller coaster ride and I spot a person watching me from a living room window. I wave and she waves back. Hi. I'm having fun, how about you?

She may wonder, what is someone doing in the water during Seattle's most disruptive winter storm, with snow and cold (cold for us). My answer, I'm going through the looking glass for an adventure.

It's a quick swim back, running with the wind and swell. There's no good exit for me here, and it's just as easy (and more fun) to swim back to Hawley Cove to get to my car. I'll start at Wing Point next time, and head Bainbridge's outer coast to Yeomalt Point, where I've been warned about the rip currents. Yeomalt is an Anglicized version of a native word that means "where the currents meet."

Sounds fun, especially during a storm.

But to finish Wing Point right, I want calm water so I can explore the sandbar better. It's hard to see everything that's here from a roller coaster.


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